Stars & Empire: 10 Galactic Tales

by Jay Allan

  “It’s the price we pay for vitra,” Leader said. “When the gols tell us that they collar us for our own protection, they mean it. Without the collar, the electrical current flows freely through our bodies, and ages us. Rapidly.”

  Hoodwink studied the man uncertainly.

  “That is one truth.” Leader nodded to himself. “Do you feel the better for knowing it?”

  Hoodwink rubbed his hands together. “I never asked for the truth.” He stopped the gesture. It was too much like washing his hands. Of the truth.

  “But that’s what you’ll get when you’re with us. The truth. Or a version of it, anyway.” Leader gripped his cane tightly, and for a moment Hoodwink thought he was going to stand. But Leader merely shifted in his seat. “Something is wrong with the gols. They have been distracted lately. The gol banker giving out a thousand more drachmae than he should. The gol lutist forgetting his notes halfway through the ballad. The gol butcher misjudging his swing, and cutting off his own hand. The gol executioner, forgetting to sharpen the guillotine blade. I can cite examples from across the city. Then there’s that blank, slobbering look so many of them have developed. It’s as if they’ve contracted a plague of the mind.”

  “But the gols can’t get sick,” Hoodwink said.

  Leader nodded. “So we have been taught. Perhaps they are under an attack of some sort, in the world beyond the Gate where they reside simultaneously to our own. The Outside.”

  Hoodwink rubbed his arms together, feeling suddenly cold. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Residing simultaneously? And the Outside is dead. Everyone knows that.”

  Leader arched his eyebrows. “Indeed?”

  “And if there really were an attack on the gols,” Hoodwink said. “Would that be such a bad thing? I say let them be wiped out. A world without gols is a better world.”

  Leader smiled. “We blame them for imposing upon our freedoms, for collaring us, for confining us to the cities, it’s true. And they hunt us, the uncollared. The Users. We all hate them, with passion. But at their core, they service us. You do realize this don’t you? It’s a love-hate relationship. Without the infrastructure they provide, civilization as we know it would collapse. We’d fall back into the dark ages, quite literally, and we’d all freeze to death.”

  Hoodwink wouldn’t back down. “And we’re not in the dark ages already?”

  Leader opened his mouth, but he had no answer to that.

  Hoodwink pressed his attack. “Why did you make Ari bomb the Forever Gate?”

  “She was merely trying to open a path to the Outside,” Leader said. “We want to help the gols with what ails them, you see.”

  “Help the gols.” Hoodwink stood. “I’ve just about heard enough. You go and enjoy helping your gols.” Hoodwink held out a hand to his daughter. “Come on Ari, let’s go. You don’t need these people ordering you around.”

  She didn’t move.

  Hoodwink heard a low buzzing. He glanced around the circle. The elderly men and women had raised their hands, and electricity flowed between them, from fingertip to fingertip.

  “Please, Hoodwink, sit down.” Leader said. “Please.”

  Hoodwink lifted his palms in surrender, and sat back down. He was relieved when the electrical flows ceased.

  “Your daughter is the one who planned the Gate attack.” Leader smiled that distant smile, and his eyes locked on Hoodwink. “Do you want to know the truth? What lies beyond the Forever Gate?”

  Hoodwink couldn’t answer. That gaze overwhelmed him.

  Leader was still smiling when he looked away. “It is a land quite unlike any we have ever known. It—well, it is the land where the gols reside in actuality. As different from this world as the bottom of the ocean is from the top of the sky. In the city, none of the gols can even comprehend our offer of help. It’s beyond their programming. We can’t break past the generic response loops. But beyond the Gate, they will listen to us. They will.”

  Hoodwink sat back. “How do you know they’ll even want your help?”

  Leader sighed. “We don’t. But we must try.”

  “Okay.” Hoodwink glanced from face to face. The expressions were grim, and some of those present glowered at him. “You’re forgetting one small thing. You have to go through the Gate. Ari couldn’t even make a dent in it with that bomb of hers. So as far as I’m concerned, this discussion is pointless. And I still don’t know why you’re even telling me all this.”

  “The bomb was only a hope we’d entertained. To create a passage for us all. But there is another way.” Leader was silent a moment. He stared at that peeling wallpaper, and the guttering wall candles flicked shadows across his face. “It is a dangerous path, too perilous for most of us. A path only the strong and hale among us can take.”

  Leader’s eyes found Hoodwink, and then shifted to Ari, at his side.

  Hoodwink realized what the man implied, and he stood. “Ari’s not doing it.”

  “You’re not my father anymore, remember that,” Ari said quietly.

  Hoodwink didn’t look at her. “Whatever you planned for her, I will do. Send me in her place.”

  Leader nodded to himself. “This is what I want, too. Ari must stay here. Her connections to the mayor are too important. Someone else must go. Someone newly uncollared, yet still strong in body. But you should know, no one we’ve ever sent beyond the Gate has returned.”

  “I don’t need you to save me,” Ari said.

  “I’ll do it,” Hoodwink insisted. He wasn’t going to lose her again.

  Leader nodded solemnly. “If there’s anyone you want to say good-bye to, anyone at all, now’s the time. Because as I said, no one’s ever come back.”

  Hoodwink glanced at Ari. “I plan to be the first.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Hoodwink strode through the wintry streets of the city that birthed him.

  He’d spent the night in exhausted sleep at the inn. By morning, the snowstorm had let up, allowing the sun to shine weakly in the cold sky. The Users had given him leave to make his good-byes, and so he left. Ari had joined him. He wasn’t sure if she came for the company, or to act as his keeper. He didn’t mind either way.

  He made his way across one of the richer quarters of the city. Even here the gols were still shoveling the snow from the recent storm. A few shopkeepers had pitched in, piling the snow into deep drifts beside their walls, and for the most part the street was clear. Many of the shops had reopened, since most of the buildings also served as homes for the owners—to open up was as simple as unlocking the front door and flipping the sign. Almost all of the buildings were single-story dwellings of gray rock, though there were a few two-stories among them.

  A few buyers were already out, dressed in heavy cloaks, moving between the shops. Pretty-faced hostesses in fur coats beckoned customers to eat at their restaurants. Smoky-voiced doormen announced post-snowstorm deals at their taverns.

  Hoodwink tried to soak-up as much of it as he could. This might be the last time he saw all of this. Leader had given him only an hour to get his affairs in order, and then Hoodwink was to seek him out on Forever Street. One hour.

  I’m going to miss this place, he thought. And yet he felt content, because Ari walked at his side. Ari, the daughter he had thought lost to him. The daughter he would have sacrificed everything for. At his side. Even if he only had an hour to live, it was all worth it, because she was here.

  “I’d given up, you know,” Hoodwink said into the dragging silence between them.

  Ari glanced at him distractedly. “On what, Hoodwink?”

  “On you. On myself. I didn’t, well, I guess you could say, when you left, my world ended. It really did. I wasn’t myself anymore. And now you’re back and everything’s okay again.”

  “I’m not sure what to say to that.” Ari crossed her arms. “Sounds like I’ve some pretty big shoes to fill.”

  “You don’t have to say anything.” Hoodwink smiled. “You’re filling them just by
being here, you are.”

  Ari declined an invitation to eat at a restaurant from a well-groomed host. When the host made the same offer to Hoodwink, he immediately raised his hands. “Not me young man, I’m poor.” The man smirked, and then turned to accost the next passer-by.

  “You know,” Hoodwink told Ari as they continued on. “I’ve always felt a little uncomfortable in the richer parts of the city like this. It’s not so much I can’t afford to shop in these places—if I really wanted to, I could come here and blow a few month’s wages—but it’s more the beggars looking for handouts that bother me.” He nodded at a dirty-faced mendicant perched between one of the storefronts. He and Ari had passed many such men already, and he gave each and every one of them a wide berth, including this latest. “They remind me of the ashes of poverty I’ve risen up from. Maybe it’s a reminder I need now and again to keep myself sharp, knowing that it can be something as small as a month’s pay that separates the haves from the have-nots.”

  Ari was smiling, and seemed to be struggling to suppress a giggle.

  Hoodwink frowned. “I was being serious. You find something funny?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “It’s just, I’ve always wondered what you’d be like. My real father. Not the one from my revised memories, but the father I hoped I’d one day meet. And here you are, eccentricities and all.”

  Hoodwink watched her uncertainly. “Am I everything you expected me to be?”

  Ari shook her head. “I’m not sure yet. I just, well, all of this is new to me.”

  “It’s new to me too, Yolin—Ari. The past doesn’t matter. The memories you have, they don’t matter. What we have here, right now, this is the truth. This is what matters. I never want to leave your life again.”

  Ari tightened her crossed arms, shivering. “And yet you’ll soon do just that.”

  “But I will return, I promised this already.” Hoodwink rubbed the tip of his mustache, a nervous habit of his. “And I’m not one to break promises.”

  Ari didn’t seem convinced. “Even if it’s a promise you can’t keep?”

  “I never make a promise I can’t keep.”

  She laughed, shaking her head. It was the same laugh he remembered. “Are you always this confident?”

  Hoodwink grinned widely. “Only around my daughter.”

  Ahead, a street busker strummed a mandolin. Hoodwink began edging sideways, acting as if the man carried the plague. But Ari stayed true to her course, and stopped—actually stopped—to listen to the man play and sing his sad song. When he was done, Ari dropped three fat coins into his hat, and the man thanked her profusely.

  Hoodwink reached into his pocket and guiltily left a small silver coin, all he had on his person.

  “You’re better than me, Ari,” Hoodwink said as they moved on. “That’s why I’m doing this, you know. The world needs you. But me, I’m just, well, I’m just a middle-aged, miserly barrel-maker. Not young and generous of heart like you.”

  Ari seemed troubled. “Generous, maybe, but I won’t be young for long unfortunately.”

  “Then leave the Users. You don’t owe them a thing. You have your whole life ahead of you.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t, Hoodwink. First of all, I’d have to give up vitra. You’ve tasted it. The power, the sense that you’re truly alive. That’s not something you can let go off easily.” Hoodwink couldn’t disagree there. “And second of all, for once in my life I feel like I belong to something. Feel like I’m making a difference. We can help the world as Users. I have to stay. You must see that.”

  “What I do see,” Hoodwink said. “Is that you’ve inherited my famous stubbornness. A part of the old Yolinda is still inside you after all.”

  Ari pressed her lips together, and she looked away. “I’d like to think so.”

  “Oh, I know so.” Hoodwink rested a hand on her shoulder. “You stopped for the busker. You could’ve given him the coins and walked on. But you stopped to listen. Why?”

  “I don’t honestly know.” She tapped her chin with a finger. “I’ve always liked music, I suppose. And that song he was singing, well, it got to me, you know? I felt it deep inside.”

  “Your mom always wanted to be a singer. She used to sing to you, every night before bed.”

  Ari leaped over a slushy area of ground in front of a tavern. “The mother of my revised memories hates singers, and anyone who wants to sing. She told me that singing was daft, and music was for the birds.”

  “Which is the furthest thing from your actual mother,” Hoodwink said. “Do you see? It proves that the old Yolinda is still in there somewhere.”

  Ari’s lips twitched in irony. “How do you know I didn’t stop and listen to the busker just to spite the memory of my false, music-hating mother?”

  Hoodwink couldn’t help but smile. There was definitely some of the old Yolinda left in her.

  The two walked in silence for a time. He felt the fake collar the blacksmith Karl had given him, its bronze pressing against his throat. The sham seemed to be working so far. No one paid him or Ari any heed. Earlier he’d even passed a group of gol soldiers, and none had even spared him a glance. He supposed it helped that his prison-issue robes were gone, replaced by an inconspicuous dun coat. He also wore mittens and a cloak—an outfit that was at least somewhat appropriate for this quarter.

  It was close to mid-morning, and the slightly warmer temperatures encouraged frigid pockets of mist. As Hoodwink and Ari stepped into one such pocket, Hoodwink’s thoughts seemed to cloud as well. He and Ari had to weave left and right to avoid the murky shapes of passers-by.

  His mind wandered, and he thought of the Forever Gate. He was going to cross it and stare death in the face a little under an hour from now. Incredible.

  “I sometimes have this recurring dream.” Hoodwink felt freer to talk now that his face was half-obscured in mist, just as if this moment were itself a dream. “In it, I’m always in a faraway place. In a land nothing like this one. A land long drowned. In the dream, I’m bodiless, and I see in all directions at once. It terrifies me.”

  Ari remained silence. There was only the sound of their footsteps on the shoveled cobblestone, and the footfalls of the ghostly passers-by.

  “I lay awake afterwards,” he continued. “And wonder: Is that where I will go when I die? Will I live forever in that faraway land? And more importantly, do I want to live forever there? Spending an eternity as some bodiless entity, remembering what I once was, and never able to return doesn’t have much appeal.”

  Ari seemed to stiffen beside him. “Why are you telling me this?”

  Hoodwink sighed. “I don’t know. I guess I’m afraid of the Gate and what lies beyond it. Afraid of death. There’s a reason why we have a Forever Gate. A reason why not even the gols will cross it. And your Users don’t know half the truth of it either, though they pretend they do.”

  Ari sounded sad. “You don’t have to do this Hoodwink. I never asked you to.”

  “I know Ari. But I want to do it. It has to be me. You know that.”

  The fog lifted as the two of them passed into Grassylane district, where the mansions of moderately successful merchants squatted behind fences of bronze and gates of iron. Despite the district’s name, there was no grass here.

  “You should come in,” Hoodwink said. “And meet her.”

  Ari shook her head. “I think … I think it’s better if you go alone. I’ll meet you with Leader at the rendezvous. Good luck Hoodwink.”

  She gave him a quick hug and turned back.

  Hoodwink watched her vanish into the mist, just as if she herself had only ever existed in a dream.

  CHAPTER 7

  Hoodwink sat with chattering teeth in a plush chair in the sitting room, right where the maid had told him to. Those cold, travertine walls seemed to be closing in around him. He hated travertine. It was like ice in this weather, and the sitting room had no fireplace. But that was the style of the rich. And the rich so loved imitating
the rich.

  Well, at least the floor was carpeted. That helped retain some of the heat. Still, it wasn’t for the cold that he was shivering. No, he worried what his reception would be. He hadn’t come to this place in six months. And visiting now, after what happened yesterday morning … the maid’s eyes had nearly bugged out of their head when she saw him at the door, and it was only with an effort that she managed to calm herself down after he’d forced his way in.

  He was staring at a wall hanging of a strange underwater scene when Briar came into the foyer. The two exchanged how-are-yous and exuberant jolly-goods just as if Hoodwink wasn’t a fugitive wanted for terrorism.

  “You didn’t come to my execution,” Hoodwink said.

  “Oh, you know how it is,” Briar said casually, just as if the two of them were talking about some idle matter. “The life of a merchant. Always something to do: A client to visit, supplies to haul, money to count. Besides—” Briar palmed his chin and became very serious. “I didn’t need to see you get killed, Hoodwink. I didn’t need my last memory of you to be a body’s worth of blood gushing from your headless corpse.”

  “Sure.” Hoodwink quickly segued into the reason he’d come. “Is Cora home?”

  “Cora? No, she’s in Rhagnorak, training to be a singer. Didn’t I tell you about her application?”

  Rhagnorak. A city at least two portal hops away. You couldn’t walk Outside between the cities, but you could travel to them by portal. “No.” Hoodwink tried to hide his disappointment. “You never told me.” At least she was finally achieving her dreams now, if that was true.

  Briar slapped him on the knee. “You dirty rascal! You just can’t leave my sister alone can you!” Briar seemed a little too jolly, like he was trying to hide something. Or was he just nervous that an escaped terrorist had called upon him?

  “I’m going past the Gate, Briar,” Hoodwink said. “I’m going Outside, I am.”

  Briar merely gaped at him. “Well that’s … that’s very nice. Good for you.”